Free Will

Anti-physicalists are often accused by physicalists
of trying to sneak God in the back door, or some watered-down
version of God, like the soul, or just some notion of the inherent
specialness of human beings. While most anti-physicalists do
not harbor such hidden agendas, they
are sensitive enough to the accusation that they sometimes wrongly
neglect branches of inquiry that might seem to lend circumstantial
weight to it. One such branch of inquiry is the issue of free will.

The question of free will is one of philosophy's most frequently
asked questions. I once believed that either the question was
incoherent or the answer was no. People do have some powerful
intuitions about free will, though, and it is worth trying to
clarify those intuitions if for no other reason than that the
question keeps coming up again and again over the millennia.

Is free will a quaint human vanity?
What are we even talking about when we ask about free will?
Can we frame the notion of
free will in such a way that it is even coherent yet still respects
our rough intuitions? What would a mind
have to be like for it to have free will, and how would it work?
What kinds of natural laws would there have to be in a universe for us to
be able to say that that universe even allowed for any intuitively
satisfying notion of free will? Is our universe such a universe?

As philosophers, we are free to define our terms as we like, but
if we stray too far from common usage or intuition in this regard,
our speculations become a purely technical exercise. What are the
intuitions we must respect about free will? We all have some ideas about it and
have probably read a lot about it, but before I get into the
philosophical speculation part of this essay, I'd like to highlight
some of my own intuitions. There are certain aspects of free will that
I think are important but that for whatever reason, do not get
enough explicit consideration in the literature.

Free will does not need to be hooked up to a motor system

Free will is often thought of in terms of action, in terms of
how I might impose myself upon the world. This, however, is not
a necessary ingredient. Free will, if it exists at all, is an
aspect of consciousness, and not at all dependent on my ability to
act on it. That is, if we decide ultimately that free will is real,
it will be something that I possess even if I am lying
completely paralyzed in a hospital bed, as long as my
conscious mind is functioning. The kernel of will exists, if it
does at all, independent of any ability to impose it upon the
world. Lying in the bed, I can
allow myself to wallow in self-pity, rage, and despair, or I can
decide to spend my time calculating prime numbers, or I can
try to attain a state of perfect peace. These constitute willful
decisions, and they are no less willful if I die without ever
having recovered to act outwardly upon them, even to the extent
of telling anyone else about them.

Free will is inherently creative

I think that free will is too often
characterized in terms of selection among a limited set of options:
choose one entree from column A and a side dish from column B.
While often will manifests itself ultimately as a selection like
that, the force behind that selection is an exercise of creative
visualization. We envision different outcomes, different futures,
different selves,
and therein lies the will, even for something as mundane as ordering
Chinese food. It is creative will that leads an artist to paint
a particular painting in a particular way. Most of us have had experiences
of this kind at one time or another - being in that creative
groove is an essentially willful state of mind. Will is creative in
an unbounded, open-ended kind of way. When an ancient ruler
decides that when he dies, a man-made mountain should rise from the
desert to be his tomb, and that tens of thousands of slaves should
work for decades to make that happen, that is a monumentally willful act.
Will is about creating the options in the first place as much as it is
about choosing among them.

Free will is constitutive of self and not necessarily non-deterministic

People often say that I do not have free will if my actions are
rigidly determined by the actions of the parts of which I am made.
If all the little parts are just doing what they must according to
the laws of physics, there is no way the whole could be doing
something above and beyond the sum of the parts - the whole just is
the sum of the parts. And if the whole somehow had this thing
called free will, and this free will had any causal efficacy
whatsoever (like the ability to move my arms or legs, or to make
my fingers type), it would be a ghost in the machine:
somewhere in my body there is at least one
molecule that, under the influence of this purported free will, does
something different than whatever it would do if it were not under
the influence of this free will. That is, if the molecule (or cell,
or muscle fiber) were acting only in accord with the physics that
govern such things, it would behave one way, but under the
influence of free will, it behaves another way. This would seem to
imply that free will (of the whole-influencing-the-parts variety)
necessarily violates the laws of physics. But no scientist anywhere
has seen any violations of the laws of physics at work in the body
or brain.

Does the determinism of the physics at the low level necessarily
rule out free will, though? Is there any intuitively satisfying
definition of free will that is compatible with the idea that we
are essentially robots, whose parts whir and clank along, and whose
behavior is entirely derived from this whirring and clanking?
If you think so, then you are a compatabilist about free will.
There is nothing wrong with compatabilism, as long as you are
happy with free will as a may-be-seen-as concept.
Such a notion of free will will not do for a libertarian about
free will - someone who believes in a really-there, ghost-in-the-machine
sort of free will. For the free will libertarian, however,
it is not exactly determinism per se that kills any possibility of free will.

Free will is most often contrasted with determinism, but this
strikes me as something of a false dichotomy. Depending on what we end up
deciding free will is, whether or not
determinism precludes free will, indeterminism does not save
it. Famously, the equations of quantum mechanics, the most successful
scientific theory ever, are fundamentally non-deterministic. That
is, they predict outcomes of experiments within a statistical
range, but there is always a random factor in the prediction
of a particular single trial of an experiment. Moreover, this
indeterminacy is generally believed not to be a fault of the
equations, gaps to be filled in by future scientists, but a
fundamental feature of physical reality.

Some people look hopefully to this indeterminacy of
quantum mechanics to give free will a toe-hold in the natural
world. I will argue that there may be something to this, but it is
not quantum mechanics' indeterminacy alone that does the trick.
If I am made of my parts, if I just am my parts,
then I am in the thrall of their functioning,
whether those parts function according to deterministic Newtonian
physical principles or indeterministic quantum ones.
According to my intuitions of what is meant by free will,
it buys me no more free will to believe that somewhere in my brain,
my decisions are being
made by some electron jumping or not jumping to a higher energy
orbit within a certain time
(no matter how unpredictable beforehand)
than to believe that my entire mind functions predictably like
a clock.

While indeterminism does not by itself save free will, I do not
believe that determinism by itself necessarily dooms it.
If you made 1000 atom-by-atom copies of
me, and each one of them acted in exactly the same way when put in
the same situation, it is arguable that it would not necessarily
threaten any sense of
free will that I may have. My decisions may be freely made, even if
I would make the same ones in the same circumstances every time.
This may seem initially counter-intuitive, but at least according to my
personal sense of the term, free will does not necessarily mean that I
have some random X-factor driving my decisions. Some of the most
willful decisions we make seem somehow inevitable. Daniel
Dennett cites Martin Luther, who, upon taking the possibly suicidal
(or worse) stance of denouncing some of the practices of the
Catholic Church, said, "Here I stand, I can do no other."
Luther's actions were a deep expression of his character. He could
not be the person he was and act otherwise. Given who he was, he
was bound to do what he did, yet (again, according to my
intuitions) his was a quintessentially willful act. When you exercise
your free will, you are not merely deciding what to do, you are
deciding what to be. You creatively envision a future, often a
future self, then you instantiate that future.

This sort of willful determinism is also described quite well by
C. S. Lewis (1955) as he recounts the defining moment in
his life in which he abandoned his youthful atheism:

I felt myself being, there and then, given a free choice. I could
open the door or keep it shut; I could unbuckle the armor or keep
it on. Neither choice was presented as a duty; no threat or promise
was attached to either; though I knew that to open the door or to
take off the corslet meant the incalculable. The choice appeared to
be momentous but it was also strangely unemotional. I was moved by
no desires or fears. In a sense I was not moved by anything. I
chose to open, to unbuckle, to loosen the rein. I say, "I chose,"
yet it did not really seem possible to do the opposite. On the
other hand, I was aware of no motives. You could argue that I was
not a free agent, but I am more inclined to think that this came
nearer to being a perfectly free act than most that I have ever
done. Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a
man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only
say, "I am what I do."

We define ourselves by our choices. We drag our future selves into
existence through our will. William James (1952, p. 288) said,
"The problem with the
man is less what act he shall now choose to do, than what being he
shall now resolve to become."

I think that people
feel that determinism threatens free will because it seems to
imply that the mind could be accurately modeled by some other
system, rendering the will moot. Free will
can exist in a world in which the entities having free will act the
same way in the same circumstances (i.e. they behave
deterministically), but not in a universe in which you could
predict that behavior. If my mind is a system that always
behaves the same way when it is in state X and given input Y, then
any system that could produce that behavior when given input Y in
state X for all appropriate behaviors and X's and Y's would be able
to second-guess all of my decisions with perfect accuracy. Yet such
a system, being nothing but the functioning of its parts,
would not be exhibiting free will. It would have no greater
identity (none that was causally efficacious, anyway) above and
beyond those micro-parts. If the system has no free will and it
provably behaves exactly as I do, it certainly seems that any
supposed free will that I possess doesn't buy me much.

The threat to free will posed by determinism in such a scenario,
though, is not determinism itself, but the fact that it seems to
imply that I could be modeled by a system whose behavior is
transparently determined by the dynamics of its parts.
The problem that determinism poses for free will, then, is not
determinism in itself, but that it seems to imply a kind of
fundamental, ontological reductionism.
However we end up defining me, I may
behave the way I do deterministically and still have free will, as
long as it is not a reductive determinism, driven exclusively by the
functioning of my parts. Conversely, if I am driven strictly by the
functioning of my parts, then their being randomized in some way
(e.g. according to the principles of quantum mechanics) does not
save free will.

Free will is for partless wholes

Ultimately, the status of free will does not so much depend on
whether or not we live in a deterministic universe as it does on
whether we live in a universe in which strong, ontological
reductionism is true.
Regardless of the particular laws governing the low-level entities
in any given universe, if all things in that universe are either
those simple low-level entities or high-level things that are
nothing more than aggregates of the low-level entities, such that
all of the behaviors and properties of the high-level entities fall
out as inevitable consequences of the behaviors and properties of
the low-level entities, then free will (at least as something
possessed by the high-level entities) is an incoherent concept.

The claim of free will ultimately depends upon there being some
kind of holism at work in the universe. Specifically, for free will
to exist in me, it is necessary that
I am an intrinsic, inherent individual (i.e. that
seeing me as one single thing is not just some way of looking at the pile
of matter that is generally considered me); that
whatever Nature's principles of individuation are, I count as one
of Nature's individuals; that I am a partless whole.
(See here for a brief elaboration on this idea).

Another way of saying this is that for free will to exist, some
form of (very) strong emergence must be true. There may be more
involved than this, but for there to be free will, this much at
least must be true. For me to have free will, I must not be in the
thrall of the functioning of my parts, no matter what the operating
principles of those parts are, whether those parts function
according to deterministic or indeterministic laws.
My actions and my future state must
depend on some qualitative essence of a holistic, indivisible me.

If the universe does, in fact exhibit the required type of holism,
the principle of parsimony of natural laws
must be discarded - we are stuck with an extremely
baroque picture of the natural world. In such a world there would
not just be a handful of fundamental things of which everything is
made: photons, quarks, electrons, neutrinos, etc. and a relatively
small number of laws that describe the interactions of this handful
of fundamental things. We would instead have an infinite
number of fundamental entities, these entities would be
complicated, high-level sorts of things, they would be transient,
and each would have its own set of laws.

This lack of parsimony does not make such a
scenario inconsistent or obviously incorrect, however.
Let us imagine that the "me" that has free will is an individual
moment of consciousness rather than a constant, cradle-to-grave
kind of me (see Strawson 1997 for a good article about why this is
a plausible, and perhaps the most plausible, way to talk about the self,
or his longer work (2009)). Imagine also that a given such moment of
consciousness is a transient unique high-level individual whose
behavior springs from its own particular nature, such that it
generates, manifests, and in fact is its own law, the law
of nature that applies only to it. It is an entirely novel thing in
the universe, like a new elementary particle.
What it does from instant to instant is a surprise to everything
in the universe, including the universe itself. Its behavior, after
the fact, could be considered a new law of Nature, if one insisted
on clinging to that terminology. Furthermore, once the moment is
gone, its law will never apply to anything else. In this scenario,
the terminology of
"things" "obeying" "laws" breaks down and becomes
meaningless. If I act the way I do because of the inherent nature
of the thing that I am, and what I am will never be repeated, one
could say I obey my own custom-made law of nature, of which I am
the only instantiation. Or one could not.

This is really just the degenerate case of any law of nature, in that
all such laws are inductively derived. There is a sort of Platonism
hiding in the concept of a law of nature. In real life there is no
such thing. No electron in the history of
the universe has ever obeyed a law.
Balls on ramps and electrons do what they do
not because of some law that they all know about, but because
that's what they do. Each electron, without reference to any other
electron, and without reference to the way it is supposed to behave,
acts like an electron. Each one has somehow memorized, or "knows" its
patterns of behavior. Its behavior is built into each electron
individually. The law, such as it is, must be written into the
hardwiring of each electron, copied
a hundred zillion zillion times over,
for as many electrons as there are in the universe. No one is obeying
anything - they are just doing what each one individually wants to do.
As it turns out, all electrons behave pretty
much the same way, so we write down a general characterization of that
behavior and call it a law, and from then on we can speak as if all the
electrons in the universe "obey the law".
A law of physics is something
we invented, an abstraction,a convenient fiction to help us
track the behavior we
observe after many trials. But if we only have one
data point, and always will only have that one data point, it really
becomes a matter of preference as to whether to call that behavior
a law or random behavior.

Any unique one-off "laws" that apply to the high-level
entities would necessarily be forever unknowable to any outside
observer. Looking at such an entity from the outside, its behavior
would have to appear
to have a random factor in it. Any system of laws applying to
a universe with such things in it would characterize the
regularities of the simple, low-level things as well as it could,
and simply throw up its hands when it ran into the
behavior of the high-level entities, labeling it as "random".
We would have a sort of dualism then, but it would be an
epistemological dualism, not an ontological dualism. There would be
only one universe with one kind of stuff in it, but there would be
a division between that which we could characterize completely in
third-person terms, and that which would be forever closed off to
our laws and theories. In short, in such a
picture of the world, given the characterizations
a) I act randomly, b) I act out of free will, an
expression of my inherent nature, or c) I act
deterministically, obeying my unique law, it is
perfectly valid and consistent to say d) all of the above.

In practical terms, if our world is really like this, it is
unlikely that we could model my behavior with a machine, because
the "laws" that determine my operation are unique to me at each
instant (the "me" at each instant being different, each with its
own law(s)), and
undiscoverable without being me. And even if, by some chance, a
machine could model my behavior perfectly for a time, say ten hours, there
would be, in principle, no way to be sure that it would continue to
do so for even one second more.

Oddly, such a view is actually a form of physicalism, in that it
posits a physical basis for consciousness and free will, although
one that is quite different from that which most physicalists
suppose is true. It should be remembered as well that even if there
are these high-level fundamental entities with their own laws,
there are still low-level entities like
electrons and photons and their laws. Any claims we could make
about the high-level entities and the ways in which they behave
must not violate the more commonly known basic
physical laws that describe the behavior of the low-level entities.

Given that whenever we look at the world, all we see is the
low-level entities, and their behavior seems pretty unmysteriously
described by the physical laws that apply to such entities,
is there any wiggle room for these purported unique
high-level entities to do anything? This is another version of
classic physicalist's challenge regarding the causal closure of the
physical world: the dynamics of the world and everything in it are
completely nailed down once we nail down the dynamics of the
low-level stuff (the physics). However, this is not as true as it
appears.

As it turns out, modern physics does characterize the behavior of
the fundamental constituents of matter in the way I have said
a free will-supporting universe would have to work: we know roughly
how things will behave, but there is always an irreducible random
factor. Quantum mechanics tells us that the
low-level entities are governed by statistical laws only. The exact
behavior of the low-level entities is thus not exhaustively and
unmysteriously governed by laws - there is an irreducible "random"
factor. There is, therefore, some wiggle room for
consciousness (or, if you prefer, qualitative high-level physical
entities) to be causally efficacious, to exert some extra influence
on material things in the universe without violating any known
laws. In effect, consciousness exhibiting free will would be a
"hidden variable" in a correct physical theory, according to this
hypothesis. Crucially, quantum mechanics also gives us examples
in the real world of these indeterminate entities scaling upward
from the level of the single subatomic particle in the form of
entanglements, mixtures, and condensates.

Free Will And Consciousness

We already have truly qualitative
consciousness, and this consciousness
constitutes a big, complex, indivisible whole.
Moreover, this consciousness is efficacious.
If you buy all of this, is there any room for there not to be
a robust, libertarian free will?

The unitary nature of an agent is a necessary but not sufficient
condition for free will. What else is there to our intuitions of
free will? An agent exhibiting free will is sensitive to
the world around it. It does not function
in a perceptual vacuum. It perceives things, so causal events from the
world make an impression on it, which is to say that external events
change the agent's internal state. But these
impressions, these causal nudges, do not completely dictate what
the agent does. Neither is it the case that the missing ingredient
is a complete specification of the agent's ever-changing internal state.
If that were the case, then the input from the outside world, together
with the internal state, would dictate the agent's output and next
internal state in the manner of the classic Finite State Machine
of computer science, and we would be back to bare-bones
functionalism.

An agent incorporates external information into
itself as part of its internal
field of perception, but the agent can stand back from it as it were,
and regard it. Only in the context of free will does
descriptive information make sense.
Central to the intuitions we have about free will is the claim that a
free agent gets to survey reality, then decide what
it wants to do about it. It gets
to be an unmoved mover, an uncaused cause. It gets to be aware of things
without that awareness constituting an algorithm that it must
execute. Free will is built into the concept of descriptive information
and vice versa.

But does the idea of purely descriptive (i.e. non-prescriptive,
non-algorithmic) information make sense?
Doesn't the outside world, through physical causation, stick its
fingers into you, and play you like a piano? To the extent that
you are aware of it, it has pressed itself upon you, it has forced
you to conform to it. Under pain
of infinite regress, you are not separate from your thoughts and
percepts. The thoughts are the thinkers.

How can I be all one thing, shaped by reality,
but also stand apart from my (descriptive) percepts as a detached observer?
What does it mean to be aware of things, if I just am that awareness?
Am I one thing, all-at-once, or am I legion?

Free will is creative above all if it is anything.
It doesn't have to be about anything, in particular, it doesn't
have to be about the outside world. Remember, we are not talking (just)
about picking options off a menu, even a very complex one, but about
creating options in the first place. The "direct" percepts from the
senses (I wish there were scare quotes even scarier than normal scare
quotes, maybe ""direct"" percepts) don't constitute fingers playing us
so much as they are elements that we might (or maybe should)
incorporate somewhere in our created-moment-to-moment conscious field.

I am all one consciousness, with some regions of it more malleable
than others. The parts that we take to represent "raw sense data" are
pretty undeniable, and at times have a way of impinging themselves on
our attention with considerable force. At the same time, and as part
of that same moment of consciousness, there are other aspects
that are free to play, to interpret, to want, to focus on this or
that. External
physical reality presses upon us so that parts of us assume a certain
shape. Free will is the process by which I choose the next shape to
assume. I can be influenced by a past state without being
completely determined by it. There are still degrees of freedom
available to me.

Free will exists if we broaden our definition of it to mean the
qualitative, unitary decisions of an all-at-once consciousness.
But if we think of it as a detached observer deciding what to do
about stuff it "knows", then free will is a useful fiction.
The self that stands apart from the percepts is a construct, a
simulation. The rest of the conscious field
(the non-self) is descriptive information, stuff the simulated self "knows" or
"perceives". We are subject to the User Illusion
(see Nørretranders (1998), especially the quote
here).
We construct the self as part of the whole picture and attribute
will to it. We are self-aware, but the self of which we are aware
is a simulation. The whole has free will, but the simulated self
only thinks it does.